40,000 years ago, Cromantians - the first humans with an anatomically modern skeleton - arrived in Europe from Africa. In the July 16 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, a group of geneticists, coordinated by Guido Barbujani and David Caramelli of the Universities of Ferrara and Florence, prove that a Cromantian person who lived in southern Italy 28,000 years ago was a modern European, both genetically and anatomically. These results demonstrate for the first time that the anatomical differences between Neanderthals and Cromantians were associated with distinct genetic differences. Neanderthals, who lived in Europe for nearly 300,000 years, are not the ancestors of modern Europeans.